“I’ve been working to fix the bad reputation of bats; In ten minutes I turn people around, and they come from enemies of bats to defenders. I tell them how lesser long-nosed bats pollinate plants all over our country, including 180 species of agave.”
-Rodrigo Medellin
“Mezcal is the most complex spirit in the world… Everything about Mexico’s indigenous spirit—from the biological diversity of the raw material that goes into the tiny differences in the way the liquor is produced by different distillers and the expressive flavors that emerge as a result—will stop the average spirit lover in their tracks with its mind-boggling level of sheer nuance and complexity.”
-Emma Janzen
“Agaves are capable of growing on marginal lands otherwise unavailable for food production. Agaves annually produce 1034 metric tons per of dry biomass per hectare, and in some cases their productivity can fall into a range comparable to biofuel feedstocks with higher water and nutrients…The water use efficiency and thermotolerance of Agave species enable their cultivation on arid lands unsuitable for staple food production, allowing bioenergy production with reduced impacts on the environment and world food markets.”
-Axel Visel
“No other Mexican libation is more inextricably linked to ceremony and ritual than the mescal Oaxaca is so famous for...”
-Mary Jane Gagnier
“Mezcal, in its magico-religious conception, is an element that allows us to communicate with higher beings, to ask for good health or bountiful harvests. Mezcal is used to celebrate life or death with others. It is also an element of identity in rural communities, cuing individual ailments and vital to the collective’s preservation and healing.”
-Graciela Angeles Carreño
“As succulent plants with CAM metabolism, agaves open great possibilities for new crops with high water–use efficiency, a problem that will be increasingly important in Mexican agriculture.”
-Exequiel Ezcurra
“Agave plants, along with nitrogen-fixing, companion trees such as mesquite, huizache, desert ironwood, wattle and varieties of acacia that are readily grown alongside agave, are among the most common, prolific and yet routinely denigrated or ignored plants in the world.”
-Ronnie Cummins